Awards

The AAAS has elected Brown CS PhD alum Danfeng (Daphne) Yao (now Professor of CS, Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. '56 Faculty Fellow, and CACI Faculty Fellow at Virginia Tech) to the rank of Fellow.

Brown CS alum and Advisory Board member danah boyd has just received a Sloan Research Fellowship, recognizing her as one of the most promising scientific researchers working today, part of the next generation of U.S. and Canadian scientific leaders.

Less than a year after a receiving one of the highest honors in the field of virtual reality, Brown CS alum and former adjunct research faculty member and visiting scholar Joseph J. Laviola Jr. (now Charles N. Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida) has been recognized again.

The event featured participation from more than 400 university students from across the country and 1,000 students from 76 different countries participating virtually. Brown CS concentrators on three separate teams came home with awards.
 

New research (“Towards Improving Reward Design in RL: A Reward Alignment Metric for RL Practitioners”) co-authored by Brown CS faculty member Serena Booth has received the conference’s Outstanding Paper Award for Emerging Topics in Reinforcement Learning. 

CNTR PhD student Rui-Jie Yew and faculty collaborators Suresh Venkatasubramanian and Jeff Huang received a Best Paper Award at the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DSI) Conference for their paper "Copyrighting Generative AI Co-Creations."

Only weeks after earning the ECOOP Distinguished Paper and Distinguished Artifact Awards for work in formal methods visualization, Brown PLT has won an International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV) Distinguished Paper Award for a new misconception-based automated Linear Temporal Logic tutoring system.

Deepti Raghavan, Malte Schwarzkopf, and Nikos Vasilakis were chosen by a distinguished group of Google engineers and researchers for work that leads the analysis, design, and implementation of efficient, scalable, secure, and trustworthy computing systems. 

The new institute, based at Brown and supported by a $20 million National Science Foundation grant, will convene researchers to guide development of a new generation of AI assistants for use in mental and behavioral health.

New work (Cope and Drag, also known as CnD) from Brown PLT is a novel lightweight diagramming language. It’s just earned recognition at ECOOP 2025, receiving both a Distinguished Paper and a Distinguished Artifact Award.